OII News: World Wide Web of Humanities, Social Networking Conference, Book Launches, eResearch08 Conference, Students

11 April 2008 Oxford Internet Institute

Dear friends and colleagues,

We are delighted to welcome our first Visitor on our Civil Society Practitioners Programme: Roberto Verzola will be undertaking research at the OII (21 April - 31 May) on technologies for clean elections, with an interest in modern election technologies and country-by-country experience of implementing these. He is keen to meet academics and practitioners who could help with his research, so please contact us if you would like to meet him during his stay. About Roberto / CSPP:

1. New Project: World Wide Web of Humanities

The World Wide Web is enormous and in constant flux, with more web content lost to time than is currently accessible via the live Web...

The growing body of archived web material is immensely valuable as a record of important aspects of modern society, but there is little (if any) supporting infrastructure, processes and trusted methods available to facilitate domain-specific Internet research.

This project aims to begin to address this gap by establishing a framework for e-Humanities research using available open source tools and technologies and archived web content to create novel research interfaces to the first of many scholarly web collections of archived websites in a variety of research domains beyond e-Humanities.

The project is a collaboration with the Internet Achive and Hanzo, funded under the JISC/NEH transatlantic digitisation collaborative grants programme, part of the JISC digitisation programme.

Gulbenkian Lecture theatre, Law Faculty, University of Oxford. Styled as: 'A conversation between Jonathan and Frederick Schauer (Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University)'. A reception follows at the University Club with words from Emily Taylor (Nominet).

Jonathan Zittrain is the Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the OII, and co-founder of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The book tour has been in progress since early March: Talk at Google/Stanford Conference, Palo Alto : DC Book Party, Google DC : USC/Annenberg, Media Re:public Conference, LA : LA Book Party : Talk at Yale : Talk to Social Sciences Department at Wesleyan : Keynoting Conference at Washington University, St Louis : New York Book Party [**JZ is currently here**] : Boston Book Party (Berkman Center) : Keynote to Web 2.0 Expo : and then London! .. and Oxford!

4. OII/Ofcom Social Networking Conference

The recent OII/Ofcom Conference on Social Networking (April 7) turned out to be a great success, with interest for the topic and the event from many different corners. Attendees represented a varied group of policymakers, academics, businesses and civic practitioners.

'Literacy, default privacy codes by providers and parental awareness were all offered as potential ways to help social networkers take up the opportunities that these sites have to offer while simultaneously avoiding the risks. The feeling was that the positive experiences and benefits outweighed the negative aspects and risks. There was a clear call for more evidence about the effectiveness of literacy and industry self-regulation strategies and about the negative experiences that people have with social networking sites.' Ellen Helsper, OII (Organiser)

Feedback from the day has been very positive: those who attended agreed that it was interesting, exciting and stimulating .. our thanks go out to all who made it such a wonderful event.

As part of the session on 'Intimate Relationships and Online Social Networks' the results of the OII study 'Me, My Spouse and the Internet: Meeting, Dating and Marriage in the Digital Age' were presented.

5. Conference: eResearch08

We have received a large number of papers for the eResearch08 conference, with many submissions in particular from Asia and Australia. Authors will be informed of the Programme Committee's decisions by 15 April 2008.

6. Interns!

Would you like to work on an OII research project over the summer?

We are looking for Summer Interns to work on the Peach project (ethical, legal and social issues in virtual environments), the Oxford eSocial Science (OeSS) project (social shaping of e-Research technologies and collaborative distributed science).

7. Student Diary / re:publica08

Earlier this month a number of OII DPhil students spent five days in Berlin as part of the first ever OII DPhil trip that they had independently organised. Some of the highlights of the agenda included:

- a meeting with the board of Germany's #1 social network provider (Studi VZ) to discuss the future of social networking

'These days a number of PhD students from the Oxford Internet Institute are leaving behind the dreaming spires of Oxford to have a look at some other forms of life apparently out there. In short: We have organized a trip to Berlin. Making the most out of the diverse backgrounds of us doctoral students (by now a sizeable share of the OII) has been around as an idea for some time now so it was only consequent to organise a trip to one of our original home towns.

So what are we up to? It's both a trip dedicated to work as well as, ahem, cultural exchange. We have been presenting at re:publica08, a conference that brings together about 800 (mostly German-speaking) bloggers, Net-activists and academics. It has been an exciting event so far and Alejandro has some more coverage on the conference [...]'

'While there was not a massive jump in the number of blocked sites in the days preceding the election, the type of sites filtered has taken a more political turn, says Mahmood Enayat, who is studying Iran's filtering at Oxford University's Internet Institute in the UK.'